No, fast C in the 80's and early 90's meant writing code that was actually like this:
naked void my_C_func()
{
asm {
...
}
}
Which basically meant using C as a poor man's macro assembler and nothing to do with what ANSI C is.There were also other tricks related to unions and bit fiddling.
In those days, on 8 and 16 bit home computers, C was seen like managed languages are nowadays.
Re:Chez Scheme as the Racket VM
by Johnny_Brahms on Thursday February 16, 2017 @12:23PM
(#13661734)
I see what you mean. I never did those gigs, so I wouldn't know. In hindsight I don't regret it :)
Looking at older C code is still better than seeing the hoops people jump through to get [insert programming language] to run at regular C speeds.
Fast C usually doesn't include weird workarounds for things like Implementation-specific GC quirks or bending language semantcs to force it to do what you want.